The trend to use Unicode as the universal character encoding for information interchange has been growing stronger, and most software producers on the market have announced plans to adopt Unicode. I have therefore decided to propose the appropriate way to encode information in Latinized Taiwanese languages with Unicode.
The Latinized Taiwanese languages, are ’Amis, Bunun, Hakka, Ho-lo-oe, Mandarin, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiat, Tao, Tayal, Thao, Truku, and Tsou. Except for the case of Mandarin, where Hanyu Pinyin is considered, the Latinized orthographies I will be discussing are those found in the published Bible translations. Additional information found in other published materials using the same or only slightly different Latinized orthographies are also considered.
The most important parts of this article are sections 3, 4, 6 and 7, where characters not encoded in ISO 646 (ASCII) are used. Only such characters will be discussed in these sections.
This article is not normative in any way, but implementation according to the proposal herein is encouraged. Suggestions, comments and corrections are more than welcome.